The Trump Administration Calls on Iranians to “Make a Choice About Their Leadership”

A protest in Tehran against President Trump’s decision, earlier this month, to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by the Obama Administration.

Photograph by Tasnim News Agency / Reuters

In a speech on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the United
States will “crush” Iran with a new package of economic, diplomatic,
military, and cyber pressures if it does not accept sweeping changes to
its policies at home and abroad. The new U.S. policy laid out a dozen
new demands that put the Trump Administration on a collision course with
the Iranian government—and falls rhetorically short only of supporting
an uprising by the Iranian people. “At the end of the day, the Iranian
people will decide the timeline,” Pompeo said, when asked how the new
policy would play out. “At the end of the day, the Iranian people will
get to make a choice about their leadership. If they make the decision
quickly, that would be wonderful. If they choose not to do so, we will
stay hard at this until we achieve the outcomes that I set forward
today.”

The Trump Administration will more aggressively confront
Iranian operatives and their allies in Lebanon’s Hezbollah operating
around the world, Pompeo vowed. The Islamic Republic “will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.” A new
package of sanctions, still to be unveilled, will impose “unprecedented
financial pressures”—the strongest in history—on Tehran, Pompeo said, at
the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. Iran “should know that this is just the beginning.”

The Administration did hold out the option of full diplomatic and
commercial reconciliation with the Islamic Republic—if it agreed to all
twelve demands for “tangible, demonstrated, and sustained shifts” in
policies. The demands ranged from ending military aid to Middle East
militias and closing down its ballistic-missile program to permanently
abandoning uranium enrichment and releasing all foreign detainees. “We
didn’t create the list,” Pompeo said. “They did.”

But the tenor of the speech challenged the revolutionary
regime itself as it approaches its fortieth anniversary, next February.
“At this milestone, we have to ask: What has the Iranian revolution
given the Iranian people?” Pompeo, who has led the State Department for
less than a month, said. “The regime reaps a harvest of suffering and
death in the Middle East at the expense of its people.” Pompeo said the
United States stands “in total solidarity” with the regime’s
“longest-suffering victims: its own people.”

Pompeo also assailed the “fatal flaws” of the 2015 nuclear agreement, brokered by the Obama Administration over two years of intense
negotiations. He said the deal “merely delayed the inevitable
nuclear-weapons capability” that he said Iran was developing, and that
the pact put the “world at risk.”

In Tehran, President Hassan Rouhani rebuffed the United States. “Who are you to decide for
the world?” he told the Iranian media. “Last year, we promised that we
wouldn’t return back to the way things were, and we didn’t. But today, a
government is in office in the United States that returned their country
fifteen years back overnight and is repeating the same words of 2003 and
2004,” he said.

The strategy leaves the United States at odds with the five other major
powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—that were equal
partners to the nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, the most significant non-proliferation agreement in more than a
quarter century. The five other major powers have committed to adhering
to the deal, with the European Union considering legislation that will
nullify the effects of U.S. sanctions on foreign companies that continue
doing business with Iran. The new U.S. strategy does, however, reflect
the ambitions of key U.S. allies in the Middle East, notably Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The speech was both cheered and jeered in the Washington foreign-policy
community. “It was a diplomatic overreach, to say the least,” Wendy
Sherman, who led the Obama Administration’s negotiating team with Iran,
told me. “To think that we’d allow Iran to go back on the path of
developing nuclear weapons while we try to get Iran to meet all twelve
objectives is dangerous. It’s extraordinary. The underlying objective is
to tell the Iranian people, ‘You can overthrow your government.’ ”

The prospect of Iran acceding to all twelve demands, Sherman added, “is
virtually zero. What Trump did will actually make it harder to achieve.”
The strategy will also allow Tehran to blame the United States if the
economy deteriorates. Trump’s threats since December to abandon the
nuclear accord have helped cause the rial, Iran’s currency, to lose a
third of its value.

Others called the new strategy an imaginative blend of
maximum pressure and maximum diplomacy. “The U.S. put a lot on the table
if Iran ends its malign activities, including the restoration of full
diplomatic and economic relations,” Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive
of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “It’s a big offer,
with an opportunity for a big diplomatic breakthrough that benefits the
Iranian people and the U.S.”

The most controversial implication of Pompeo’s speech is
that the Administration would ultimately prefer regime change to
reëngagement with the Islamic Republic. The secretary appealed to
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a hard-liner, to “summon
the courage to do something historically beneficial” for his people. But
he also strongly condemned President Rouhani, a centrist who won office,
in 2013, pledging to engage with the United States. Noting the protests
over the economic crisis and women’s rights since December, Pompeo made
it clear that the Administration sides with Iran’s “struggling people.”

Assessments of the regime’s longevity have shifted among
Iran experts in Washington over the past six months. “Tens of thousands
of people have been on the streets over the past few months yelling
‘Death to the dictator’ and demanding fundamental changes in the way
they’re ruled,” Dubowitz said. “Is there anybody that wants this regime
to stay in power? Certainly, the Iranian people themselves have made it
clear that they want a transition to a democratic government that honors
their aspirations.”

But the Administration’s strategy is also being challenged
by those who believe the revolution has failed abysmally. They contend
that a hodgepodge of approaches will not work. “Pompeo has
not outlined a strategy, but rather a grab bag of wishful thinking that
can only be interpreted as a call for regime change in Iran,” Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy-planning staffer who advised
the George W. Bush Administration on Iran policy, wrote on Twitter on
Monday. Maloney said she supports regime change in Iran. “I just don’t
think it will happen at the barrel of a gun or in response to US diktat.”

The new U.S. strategy “is no longer about Trump fulfilling campaign promises or trying to satisfy his own ego re: a
‘bigger, better deal,’ ” she added. “It’s his infantile approach to
foreign policy that purports to solve intractable challenges through the
application of maximalist pressure.”

The speech lacked specifics in many areas, namely how the
Administration will mobilize key players in the global economy to side
with it in punishing Iran. Pompeo’s Iran strategy is “basically
sanctions on steroids, and appealing to the Iranian public,” Dennis
Ross, who worked for five Republican and Democratic Administrations and
is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tweeted. “True the public is alienated from the regime but the US visa
policy also alienates them. And sanctions can only work if truly
international. Will we have such a coalition?”

In Tehran, the foreign minister replied to Pompeo’s speech on Twitter.
“US diplomacy sham is merely a regression to old habits: imprisoned by
delusions & failed policies,” he wrote, adding that Tehran was working
with the five other countries that signed the 2015 nuclear accord in order to
save it. But the challenges that the accord faces have grown since Trump
withdrew the United States, on May 8th. Pessimism among the remaining signatories regarding its long-term fate is growing as well. The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson,
said the U.S. plan for a “new jumbo Iran negotiation, a new treaty” is
“very difficult” to achieve “in anything like a reasonable
timescale.” A key envoy involved in the deal told me that his reaction
to Pompeo’s speech was “a silence full of anxiety, disbelief, and
sadness.”